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Dust To Dust - The Plight Of The Unplayed Game
Thanks to Eurogamer for its editorial discussing the phenomenon of having too many videogames and too little time. The author starts by suggesting: "Take a look at your own shelves. Look closely. Spot any shrink-wrapped games you definitely will get around to playing some day?" He continues: "Let's have a look at this writer's personal 'to play' pile: MGS: The Twin Snakes, Super Mario Sunshine, Knights of the Old Republic, Full Spectrum Warrior, True Crime, Deus Ex 2", before concluding: "Games. We love them. We could fill about 47 lifetimes playing them. But we hate them too. Most are overblown, bloated, and chaotic in their design. If they were movies, most of the footage would be on the cutting room floor. Few games designers seem to know how to edit, and weigh down the production process in the belief that we need bigger games."
Personally, i can't afford to buy games i don't plan on buying. And most of the time, i feel games aren't long enough, but maybe i only buy good games? Couldn't say really.
It is just a matter of time until the length of time in certain game genres becomes nearly standardized. Such as the "average" movie length of 75 minutes.
"The Plight Of The Unplayed Game"? Hell, this article should be retitled "The Plight of the Guy With More Money Than He Knows What to Do With". He goes on and on about the games he's bought and never played, and I'm sitting here thinking of how I'm going to make this month's rent.
where the comment ends and sig begins
I also have some unplayed games on the shelf, but it would be an injustice if Star Wars:Knights of the Old Republic was one of those games. Seriously, try it out!
Every now and then a game comes along that miles above the rest (especially for RPGs), like Fallout, the original Deus Ex or KOTOR. If you don't have much time, it's a good idea to not buy many games, and just the quality games when they come out. As the article says - be more discerning.
The big problem with games these days, is they take far too much time to really get into the *good* parts of a game. Much like a book that starts off slow and doesn't get exciting until halfway through. Games however, cost a lot more, and frankly are much more repetitive and leave much less to the imagination than a book.
Your average, casual gamer, does not have a whole crapload of time in one sitting to spend getting into a game. In my opinion if a game cannot draw a person in within the first hour, that person probably will not be anywhere near as motivated to play it again.
My solution to this, keep games short, sweet, unique, and appropriately priced. Development times would probably be shorter, development *costs* would probably be shorter, and hell, people might actually get a decent variety of games that they can actually finish in one hour spurts throughout their hectic lives.
stupid enough to buy games that you have no intention of playing immediately? That'd be as stupid as saving downloaded porn that you're never going to look at again...Ohhhhhhh! I get it now. Never mind.
Brian
As for getting the money for rent: you'd be suprised what a bounty the human body can provide! Why, selling your blood, hair and teeth alone should supply you with the necessary funds. If you have a woman, you can milk her and sell the milk, or make cheese and peddle that at the local farmer's market.
Yeah, right.
Great jumpin-jehosephat; I have tons of shrink-wrapped DVDs sitting on my shelf waiting to be watched! Cripes, the only chance I've had to play Doom III was at a Circuit City, with a small Japanese child behind me screaming helpful hints. I don't have time to go buy games, let alone play them. You want to talk about a genre where there's too much stuff to deal with? Talk about books! People have written books for millenia and they don't ever go out of date. Hell, almost every medium out there comes out faster than one person can deal with. Magazines, TV, movies, books, radio, newspapers, internet sites - video games probably come out at the most REASONABLE pace of all, simply because you only play up-to-date games. You never have to retroactively play a game because your friends can't believe you missed that classic. I haven't seen Scarface - I get bothered about it daily. No one ever yells at me for not playing Contra enough.
I have to wonder how age correlates with the people who can't afford many games, vs. those of us who collect more games than we can play.
I find that as I age, I have less and less time for game playing, more and more disposable income, and as much of a desire as ever to play the great games that come out every year.
The people who are, say, under 30 and are saying "you have too much money" are missing the point: this is the plight of the aging gamer. I'm 34, and it's only the last few years that I've found myself to have more games than time.
That is completely not me nor any other RPG fan.
;)
I remember playing Shining Force I or II many many times over, happening to find the special characters without really trying to do so.
I remember playing FFT till I fell asleep, and then woke up sometime later before dawn, and continued on.
I remember playing FF Legend(s) on the original ugly-ass yellow green LCD game boy, restarting an innunmerable amount of times, trying to kill that cactus looking 'Seven' character.
I remember re-playing the Fallout games just to see all the different things you could do with the character classes.
I remember playing Dungeon Master (anyone remember that game), and trying every damn spell combination to see if there were other 'unknown' spells besides zo-kath-ra.
So you see, I don't know what this guy is talking about
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
The writer here deserves the fate that she put forth...a good pelting with some rocks. that someone would give this person a job writing about games baffles the mind. The job should go to a true gamer..not someone distracted by a significant other(lesbian lover), SOCCER, family, friends, kids or chores. A true gamer of course has nor needs none of these things because they only distract from what is important. The game.
"Your average, casual gamer, does not have a whole crapload of time in one sitting to spend getting into a game" There are games for these types and there are games for hardcore gamers. Don't try to shoehorn the industry into serving one demographic. Take me for example: my PC tells me when I am allowed to eat, sleep, or do something fancy like go to school. I probably wouldn't like your short and sweet games nearly as much as my epic and complex games. Coincidentally, I also love really long books (when I'm given permission to read). To conclude, let's all be more careful before grabbing the proverbial tiller.
I'm a college student. I have very little income, but lots of free time. (Well, not really lots of free time, but more than most employed adults.) When I buy a game, the *very first thing* I consider is the 'time i'm gonna get out of this game'/price ratio. I won't buy a game that's only gonna give me ten hours of playtime. A game that's 20 hours would have to come down in price a lot before I'd buy it. Even massive rpgs that promise 70+ hours of gameplay...I still think, 'yeah, but is it worth 50 bucks?' Cause let's face it, 50 bucks is a lot of fucking money for a toy.
Basically...fuck short and sweet. I hate playing a game for a little bit and then tossing it aside never to played again. Maybe it's such a huge factor for me these days because games have virtually zero replay value anymore. I personally think this can be blamed squarely on systems with memory cards. Wonderful idea...but the problem is, when even your favorite dumb action game has savepoints, it just makes it so that when you beat the last level, you're done. I mean, looking back to when I was a kid...I probably put about 200 hours into something like contra, and probably 150 of those were the first few levels. I'm not saying memory cards are bad, cause they're great, but they've really changed the way we play games and how much enjoyment we get out of them (in terms of hours) for the worse.
So maybe it's just because I don't buy into the whole 'video games are art, they're great storytelling!' thing. I call bullshit on that. Video game storytelling is as awful and childish as ever, by and large. No, if I'm going to throw down a large chunk of money on a game, I want to spend the largest amount of time possible enjoying it. I don't want some supposed masterpiece that's short and sweet but tells a great story. I want something that'll literally kill hours and hours and hours. Because video games are, and always have been, a timekiller. Forget whatever else.
hot foreign sheep.
When I was unemployed I had lots of time to play games but little money to buy them. Now that I'm gainfully employed I have money to buy lots of games but no time to play them.
Same with this stack of books I'm going to get around to reading when I have the time.
The only solution I've discovered is winning the lottery, but that hasn't happened yet. But some day!
I know this situation all too well. I think it's connected with the fact I started work just over a year ago. Since then, I've had a cash-flow I could only dream of during my student days, but a pronounced lack of free time. My "to play" pile includes Full Spectrum Warrior (beyond the first 2 missions), Forbidden Siren, Soulcalibur II and Metroid Prime. I think the fact that I now play Final Fantasy XI also doesn't help; MMORPGs tend to edge out other games quite brutally.
I can sort of relate to the article author in regards to having a lot of games that I haven't finished yet. For me, I really blame the fact that the video game industry seems to have a "good game season" in which a crapload of good games will come out weeks within each other, which then forces the gamer (that has enough dough to buy all the good games) to pick and choose the ones to work on. Eventually, games are bound to be lost in the cracks.
This is just, and its kind of weird, but sometimes I don't like to keep playing RPGs because I don't want them to end. There are a few games I've played that had great stories and the battle system and graphics were decent, but I just didn't want to continue playing. Just like how some readers fear finishing a book because when the ending is made clear the suspense and fun is gone, that's how I treat a good RPG sometimes.
Here's a concept... if you want disposable income, get a job and work hard at it. When you're doing well enough at it that you have disposable income it's called a "career."
I won't buy a game until I've finished one of the games that I already own. Somewhere along the line I ended up with a few games that I still haven't played yet. So, I won't let myself buy a new game until I finish an older one.
Sure, I don't play newer games right away, but that allows for the price to drop down about $10-20, and I'm still enjoying the games that I already have.
Will money get you through times of no games better than games will get you through times of no money?
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
The game demo scene is sadly lacking. This is the movie trailer equiv. Very few trailers i see, and go, I *have* to watch that, but if I do think that, then I see it opening night.
/. story), but after playing the XIII demo, I paid for it, and I was glad I did!
Usually the trailer only showed the 30 seconds of decent footage, in which case I don't get it on DVD.
Good trailer + good film = DVD.
Gaming is different. I am looking forward to the Doom3 demo.
Why? I will not buy Doom3! But if they release a demo, I get to look at those graphics on my machine.
Like the article says about bigger games, how you 'weigh' a game is different per game.
I weigh Doom3 purley on Graphics. Therefore I will play just the demo.
Just a demo of FF7 (I never really played that game) or a game that is really compelling (GTA [1-4]) can get away with a demo - usually time limited.
Demos can make cracking easier (see recent
Commandos also had a great demo.
More demos!
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
So frankly, if you have time for all those games, either you don't have a life (job, house, wife, kids), you are not a player, but a collector, or you are not letting yourself get your money's worth.
You like Max Payne? Well good for you. There is probably a market for it but that does not mean that every game has to be a Max Payne.
There is a market for short simple games. There is a market for incredibly hard non-ending games. And there is a market for everything in between.
Accusing Deus EX 2 of being to long suggest this guy is either a really bad player or just a very bad organizer. If anything version 2 was a lot smaller and was over far too quickly.
Same with games like Elite Force wich can be completed in a couple of hours. I am expected to pay full price for that? Sorry, I grew up on games that charged full price but gave me weeks of gameplay. Hours is not going to cut it.
And having unplayed games on the shelf shows that this guy needs to get a grip on his life. He buys games he never plays? Isn't that like those shopaholics?
If we don't kill this guy then we will soon have an extra edition of the Lord of the Rings. The super cut, 1 hour for the entire trilogy. War and Peace, reader digests version. Baldur's gate, the lets not mess about version, you roll up a god and kill the bad guy on the first map. No need for all that boring endless roleplaying crap.
If you want a fast game go play tetris. A lot of games by their nature have to be long. You can't simulate a flight between London and New York in 2 minutes. Landing on the beaches of normandy will at least take you as long as walking a few hundred meters of terrain. Telling a complex tale of growing up is going to take more then 5 minutes. Driving around the nurburg ring is not going to be done in a 2 minute game.
Can't play all the games out there? Cry me a river. BUY only the games you really want and give the rest of the money to charity.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I thought it was 42 lifetimes.
Anyone else getting green underlined text with hyperlinks to other websites while viewing the eurogamer website with IE?
I thought M$ removed the Smart tags feature from IE6?
Is this spyware, or something eurogamer has done for advertising revenue?
Thanks for checking.
Vermifax
Logout
Personally I'm on the side of the "make games shorter" argument. However, shouldn't it be possible to satisfy everyone? I'm proposing, in a similar vein to the "easy-medium-difficult" setting, a "distilled-medium-dilute" setting which specifies the approximate size of the game.
I'm currently playing Doom 3 and it'll probably be weeks before I get a chance to finish it. If I could play it through in, say, 7 hours, just being exposed to the most interesting parts, and skipping some of the endless corridors and mindless fighting, I'd be happy.
That's just some cheap-ass javascript trick from the wonderful people at Vibrant Media ... nothing a good proxy can't strip out before it hits your browser.
Personally I think this type of marketing is just tacky as hell and cheapens the brand of the websites that use it.
I have too much time on my hands, and I have a little bit of spare cash to buy new games. But new games just aren't coming out. The last video game I bought was Mega Man Anniversary collection, which is just a re-release of old mega man games. Before that it had been a long time since I got a new game.
There just aren't a plethora of new good games out. Back in the NES days I would go to toys 'r' us and have trouble picking a game out. Nowadays I read about all the games online and I know exactly which ones I want. When one gets released I go to the store and get it. But quality is severely lacking. One or two good games being released every few months is about the current rate. It's really pretty sad.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I'll wager that I have the oldest shrink-wrapped game of anyone.
I have "Zone of Avoidance" by Casady & Greene,a game from maybe 1991 that requires "Mac Plus or greater". Hey, that means it'll work on my G4, right? I'll get around to playing it someday!
"Send an Instant Karma to me" - Yes
MI2 had this kind of feature. You had a choise at the beginning if you wanted to play Monkey Lite, or the full adventure.
Taking the Lite option simplified some f the puzzles, and removed some of the locations, making the game far more accesable to people on a tight timescale. It took absolutely nothing away from those who opted for the full thing.
I completed the long version, then went back and did the short version to see what was missed out. As far as I can remember the many-stage puzzles were usually simplified by removing a few sections, or you automatically found an item lying around that you would otherwise have had to solve a puzzle to obtain.
I cant see how this kind of choice can be anyhing other than a good thing?
RM
I have no sig yet I must scream.
I watched the arachnorox videos and had a great time.
It's very well edited, has an interresting plot (for a game), originality (the old super hero for instance) and have some nice twists near the end. I even bought the game after watching it, but still havent had time to play it.
Baldur's gates games could be nice to watch too if nicely edited of the long walks, especially the "let's go to the shop sell some loots and get some gold and then back to finish this place" boring trips and of course all the unnecessary time you spend in your inventory.
I mostly play games for the storyline. If I find a game with a good storyline but bad gameplay system, I just find the cheats and move on to finish it quickly. That way I don't have a large backlog of games I haven't played. It also allows me to borrow games from my friends because I don't keep them for long. If the gameplay system is good I'll usualy buy it and finish the game in a legit way.
Now, for some funny reason it is mostly classic games that I end up playing all the way to the end. For most newer games I just apply the cheat to see the end.
R.Make it Planescape Torment. Best RPG I've played in about 10 years. The setting is marvelous, really catching the steampunk-noir feel of the planescape setting, the dialog options actually enjoyable and fit the theme, the characters are truley memorable and often quite amusing, AND it can be finished without devoting months of your life to it. You can hold real sometimes philisophical! conversations with your companion NPCs.
Now if you want Morrowind open-endedness, this aint it. It is basicly a novel that you get to play through, but a quite compelling one. Luckily the "novel" is well written, has a facinating twisted plot (well ok not a perfectly NEW plot - you can see shades of Zelazny and Hammet in it), and turns a lot of the standard fantasy genre on its ear.
Other perks are that you start out reasonably powerful so none of the "see rat, kill rat" grind, you can freely multiclass, and never have to go and replay 3 hours of work because you died without saving.
Sorry about the gushing, it was just one hell of a game. I think I still have it installed on a PC somewhere
Here's some advice: Take "MGS: The Twin Snakes" and sell it back. You'll save yourself endless cinema scenes (more time spent in cinema than gameplay) of terrible voice-acting and plot, and numerous rooms of not really engaging gameplay.
I know someone's going to mod me as troll or flamebait, but I bought this game since everyone raves about the series. I couldn't stand it. I kept playing, thinking that maybe it would get better, but it didn't. After beating Psycho Mantis, I finally came to my senses and quit and sold it. I couldn't even play long enough to get to the second disc! Is the whole series this bad?
I loved the NES Metal Gear, by the way.
My stupid web site
I'm still trying to find the time to finish Doom III. I even started playing in god-mode to speed things up. Hmm... Maybe I should quit posting to slashdot and go play...
Picked it up for a song about a week ago. My System is crap, but the game still plays "reasonably" well, if I don't mind the crashing occasionally. (It's my system, not the game). Awesome game, one I plan on finishing.
It's amazing what you can run on a overclocked Celeron 366.
Sean D.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start.
You never had the experience? Now that is a classic I still play on occasion.
Sean D.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
Some game that are often "too short" or not interesting enough can create a fan base to support what everyone wants. When I played Max Payne, i finished pretty quickly, but it didn't get uninstalled for weeks thanks to the countless weapon, level and ultimately the Kung Foo mod allowed me to play MUCH longer for such a "short game." I also started playing Half-Life later than everyone. This game was much longer than any game I played before, and once interest started slowing down on the final Alien levels, it was a good thing I started playing Counter-Strike (regardless of how hard it is for a n00b to 'jump in' to CS). My point? It's all about replayability, even for games that you'll never replay in their original form. It might even be easier to 'jump right into' a modded version of the game than the boring/long/short/too exciting version of the original. Of course, we'll need a well to tell what games will be supported by the gaming community . . .
I don't even have time to play with myself let alone some long ass game.
doesn't actually work. Not enough milkfat to make a decent cheese that people will willingly consume. (Yes, it's been tried, but not by me.)
How do I know this? I have friends with a net connection and way too much free time at work. Also, a deep and abiding love of dairy products ensures that any cheese-related trivia they send me will stick in my mind.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
If I can't get around to playing a game, it's usually because I'm not really all that interested in it.
Metroid Fusion sat by my Gamecube Player unfinished for a long time. On the other hand, Metroid Zero Mission got finished the day I got it.
This isn't really a rant (this time at least) about the declining quality of games. It's a rant about rising expectations and the desire to play something _new_. Grand Theft Auto II was new, something that had never really been done before. Sure it was Zelda-like, but it did really neat previously-unseen things with the concept. Wind Waker's vast explorable ocean was like that, in that there was just so much space to investigate, and enough in it to keep it interesting. More interesting, to me anyway, than the dungeons.
But the great majority of games aren't created with an eye towards presenting a new experience first and setting second. Game designers that make games in the current climate don't say to themselves, "Let's make a game in which the player explores a great non-linear environment, in which key elements are randomized in each play, and players get rewarded for rapid advancement." Instead, what gets asked is more like, "Let's make a game in which you're a soldier who has to fight werewolves."
Some people might get themselves more jazzed up to work on the latter, but to make something great, you have to think like the former.
I have the same problem, I spend 10 dollars a week on games...you would be surprised how much you get get for under 20 dollars every two weeks. I have stacks of games from years back that are unplayed...and I have come to the conclusion that it is a collector thing, not a game playing thing...the point isnt to beat the game just to own it...just like people who collect toys that never come out of their wrappers or comics they pay over ten dollars for, read once then put on a shelf never to look at again. Just a typical nerd behavior!
... people! Christ, people with no time can just turn on god mode to go through the game in much less time (in the games that have them). It does not take a genius to figure it out. You still get to experience the content and not waste time at usually 10x the speed of the non-cheater. You want a challenge still you say? Gimme a break, anyone that wants to whip through gamecontent that fast surely does not want the challenge of restarting the same level over and over and dying wasting their precious time. The challenge is simply an illusion they just want to consume the content and the good movie-like-esque parts and the ending. I remember playing games for one reason: To see how good the friggin ending was, teh ending was like the be all and end all of many games for me back in the NES/SNES days. Once you 'finish it' (with all singleplayer games) it sits on your shelf and collects dust especially if you're working and have a family.
Case in point: A game like ikaruga is all about challenge and mastery it is a hardcore game but it is also *the perfect game* for someone who works a lot and has no time, you can finish the game in under 20 minutes each level is between 2-5 minutes in length. This is taste dependent of course but think about it. How deep can gameplay really get in a game thats only a few hours in length? It can only be superficial or very simplified at best. And games have already been taking the challenge out of games (especially most console ones) for a long time now. At some point the game stops being challenging, interesting and fun because there is no length and quality of content that you can justify spending $60-80 on.
I'm guilty of the buying more games that I get to finish. However, I've also suffered from waiting so long to get to a certain game, that said game disappears off the market and winds up on Ebay for way more than you would have paid for it. Go look up Final Fantasy VII or Freespace 2 on Ebay and look at those crazy prices.